 First edition title page | |
| Author | Thomas Hardy |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Tinsley Brothers |
Publication date | 1873 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 3 volumes |
A Pair of Blue Eyes is a novel by Thomas Hardy, first serialised between September 1872 and July 1873, in Tinsley's Magazine , and published in book form in 1873. It was Hardy's third published novel, and the first not published anonymously. Hardy included it with his "romances and fantasies".
The book describes the love triangle of a young, 19 year old woman, Elfride Swancourt, and her two suitors from very different backgrounds. Stephen Smith is a socially inferior but ambitious young man who adores her and with whom she shares a country background. Henry Knight is the respectable, established, though sexually immature and inexperienced older man who represents London society. Although the two are friends, Knight is not aware of Smith's previous liaison with Elfride.
Elfride finds herself caught in a battle with her heart, her mind and the expectations of those around her – her parents and society. When Elfride's father finds that his guest and candidate for his daughter's hand, architect's assistant Stephen Smith, is the son of a mason, he immediately orders him to leave. Knight, who is a relative of Elfride's stepmother, is later on the point of seeking to marry Elfride, but ultimately rejects her when he learns she had been previously courted.
Elfride, out of desperation, marries a third man, Lord Luxellian. The conclusion finds both suitors travelling together to Elfride, both intent on claiming her hand, and neither knowing either that she already is married nor that they are accompanying her corpse and coffin as they travel.
The novel has various settings including gothic churches, coastal cliffs, hills, valleys, and beaches.
Elfride Swancourt, the 19 year old heroine, is both extremely attractive and emotionally naïve; a Victorian Miranda. [1]
Stephen Smith, her first suitor is socially inferior, also has this childish innocence, and she loves him because he is "so docile and gentle" (chapter 7).
Henry Knight, the second suitor, is more socially superior and dominantly masculine but sexually inexperienced and immature, with the expectation of Elfride's spiritual and physical virginity. Knight is also Stephen Smith's mentor. [2]
This was the third of Hardy's novels to be published and the first to bear his name. It was first serialised in Tinsley's Magazine between September 1872 and July 1873.
The novel is notable for the strong parallels to Hardy and his first wife Emma Gifford. In fact, of Hardy's early novels, this is probably the most densely populated with autobiographical events. [3]
A review in the Examiner of Far from the Madding Crowd retrospectively referred to it as "not so exclusively pictoral [as Under the Greenwood Tree ]; it was study of a more tragic kind, with more complex characters and a more stirring plot... Both Under the Greenwood Tree and A Pair of Blue Eyes are very remarkable novels, which no one could read without admiring the close and penetrating observation, and pictoral and narrative power of the writer." [4]
Late in his life, Hardy met composer Sir Edward Elgar and discussed the possibility of Elgar basing an opera on the novel. Hardy's death put an end to the project.[ citation needed ]
BBC Radio 4 recorded the book as a serial, with Jeremy Irons as Harry Knight.
A Pair of Blue Eyes normally is categorised as one of Hardy's minor works, "a book with a few good points but a failure as a whole". [2] [3] Like Desperate Remedies , it contains melodramatic scenes that appear disconnected from the characters and plot. [3]
A focus of critical interest of the novel is the scene in which Henry Knight reviews the entire history of the world as he hangs over the edge of a cliff (reputedly the origin of the term "cliffhanger"), and eventually is rescued by a rope of Elfride's underwear. Carl J. Weber sources the scene to a picnic Hardy and his wife had, in which he was sent to search for a lost earring, claiming this passage is the "first indication in the novels of Hardy's ability to sustain interest in a tense situation by sheer power of vivid description." [5] On the other hand, Millgate claims the scene forms part of the "irrelevant" description suited to the "rag-bag" of a novel. [5] For Jean Brooks, the scene is "macabre" and an illustration of "cosmic indifference", also highlighting the comic in the rescue. [5]
However, Gittings and Halperin claim it is more likely the idea for this scene comes from an essay by Leslie Stephen titled "Five minutes in the Alps". The "cliff without a name", as it is referred to, is probably based on Beeny Cliff. [5]
Sir John Falstaff is a fictional character who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare and is eulogised in a fourth. His significance as a fully developed character is primarily formed in the plays Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, where he is a companion to Prince Hal, the future King Henry V of England. Falstaff is also featured as the buffoonish suitor of two married women in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Though primarily a comic figure, Falstaff embodies a depth common to Shakespeare's major characters. A fat, vain, and boastful knight, he spends most of his time drinking at the Boar's Head Inn with petty criminals, living on stolen or borrowed money. Falstaff leads the apparently wayward Prince Hal into trouble, and is ultimately repudiated after Hal becomes king.
Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain such as those from his native South West England.
A cliffhanger or cliffhanger ending is a plot device in fiction which features a main character in a precarious or difficult dilemma or confronted with a shocking revelation at the end of an episode or a film of serialized fiction. A cliffhanger is hoped to incentivize the audience to return to see how the characters resolve the dilemma.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman is a novel by Thomas Hardy. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British illustrated newspaper The Graphic in 1891, then in book form in three volumes in 1891, and as a single volume in 1892. Although now considered a major novel of the 19th century, Tess of the d'Urbervilles received mixed reviews when it first appeared, in part because it challenged the sexual morals of late Victorian England.
William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist and playwright known especially for The Woman in White (1859), a mystery novel and early sensation novel, and for The Moonstone (1868), which established many of the ground rules of the modern detective novel and is also perhaps the earliest clear example of the police procedural genre.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1873.
The Mill on the Floss is a novel by English author George Eliot, first published in three volumes on 4 April 1860 by William Blackwood and Sons. The first American edition was published by Harper & Brothers, Publishers, New York.
Under the Greenwood Tree: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School is a novel by the English writer Thomas Hardy, published anonymously in 1872. It was Hardy's second published novel, and the first of what was to become his series of Wessex novels. Critics recognise it as an important precursor to his later tragic works, setting the scene for the Wessex that the author would return to again and again. Hardy himself called the story of the Mellstock Quire and its west-gallery musicians "a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages, ways, and customs which were common among such orchestral bodies in the villages of [the 1850s]".
Desperate Remedies is the second novel by Thomas Hardy, albeit the first to be published. It was released anonymously by Tinsley Brothers in 1871.
The Woodlanders is a novel by Thomas Hardy. The novel is set between 1856 and 1858. It was serialised from 15 May 1886 to 9 April 1887 in Macmillan's Magazine and published in three volumes in 1887. It is one of his series of Wessex novels.
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" is a narrative poem by English author Robert Browning, written on January 2, 1852, and first published in 1855 in the collection titled Men and Women. The poem is often noted for its dark and atmospheric imagery, inversion of classical tropes, and use of unreliable narration. Childe Roland, the only speaker in the poem, describes his journey towards "the Dark Tower", and his horror at what he sees on his quest. The poem ends when Roland finally reaches the tower, leaving his ultimate fate ambiguous.
Thomas Hardy's Wessex is the fictional literary landscape created by the English author Thomas Hardy as the setting for his major novels, located in the south and southwest of England. Hardy named the area "Wessex" after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the unification of England by Æthelstan. Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist, in many cases he gave the place a fictional name. For example, Hardy's home town of Dorchester is called Casterbridge in his books, notably in The Mayor of Casterbridge. In an 1895 preface to the 1874 novel Far from the Madding Crowd he described Wessex as "a merely realistic dream country".
Emma Lavinia Gifford was an English writer and suffragist. She was also the first wife of the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy.
The Overlook is the 18th novel by American crime writer Michael Connelly, and the thirteenth featuring the Los Angeles detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch.
William Tinsley was a British publisher. The son of a gamekeeper, he had little formal education; but together with his brother Edward (1835–1865) he founded the firm of The Tinsley Brothers, which published many of the leading novelists of the time.
The Starlight Express is a children's play by Violet Pearn, based on the imaginative novel A Prisoner in Fairyland by Algernon Blackwood, with songs and incidental music written by the English composer Sir Edward Elgar in 1915.
Horatio Mosley Moule (1832–1873) was the fourth son of Anglican priest and inventor Henry Moule, and is best remembered as a friend of Thomas Hardy. He was generally known as Horace, to distinguish him from his Uncle Horatio, after whom he was named.
The Belton Estate is a novel by Anthony Trollope, written in 1865. The novel concerns itself with a young woman who has accepted one of two suitors, then discovered that he was unworthy of her love. It was the first novel published in the Fortnightly Review.
The Vicar of Bullhampton is an 1870 novel by Anthony Trollope. It is made up of three intertwining subplots: the courtship of a young woman by two suitors; a feud between the titular Broad church vicar and a Low church nobleman, abetted by a Methodist minister; and the vicar's attempt to rehabilitate a young woman who has gone astray.
Annie Tinsley, born Annie Turner, was a British novelist and poet. She used the name Mrs Charles Tinsley.
A Pair of Blue Eyes public domain audiobook at LibriVox